Do we "motivate" the cows to move with whips or intice them with sweet
feed? offers a strange metaphor. Reminds me of the joke both Bertalanffy
and Alfie Kohn share: B. F. Skinner did all his work with rats and pigeons
and then wrote about humans.
The question I will ask, if management is the cowboys dropping sweet feed
along the cow's path, what does that say about workers' intellectual and
motivational capacities? Deming said that once you've destroyed the
people in a company, you don't have much left. I'd say that if the people
in your company aren't realizing their potential, neither is your company.
And how can people motivated by carrots and sticks realize their
potential?
If people need extrinsic motivation to perform, who motivates the
motivators?
-- Ron Davison (RonDavison@aol.com), San DiegoLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>